Bill Buckley, Domestic Terrorist

by John Taylor

Exclusive to The Libertarian Enterprise

In an op-ed piece which ran locally in the Washington Times on
Saturday May 18th, William F. Buckley tells the story of a case in
Oregon in which a priest hears a confession from a man who had been
arrested and jailed, accused of murdering three children.
The prosecutor secretly taped the confession, and now announces
that he intends to present the confession to a grand jury. The local
archdiocese insists that all confessional exchanges between priests
and petitioners are confidential and "sacredly inviolate".
The Attorney General cites a statute that allows the state to
legally record any conversation (except between lawyer and client),
even if surreptitiously. He further asserts that the exchange is
already no longer private because the technician recording it and the
typist who transcribed it have both heard it.
Buckley is incensed on religious grounds. He refers to the case
as "naked fascism, truly the end of the line". He goes on to spend
quite a few more column inches in high Catholic dudgeon. He calls for
impeachment and disbarring of the Attorney General, and advocates
that court officers, from judge to janitor, "[r]efuse to cooperate
with the proceedings in any way." As part of his summation toward the
end of the article, he states:

This is an absolutely clear-cut case justifying civil
disobedience. If the state tells a citizen he may not pray to
his own God, the state is by that very act a tyrant, meriting
disobedience even with the use of force, if necessary, to
prevent the usurpation. ...
Any intervention by police should be resisted as confidently as
one would have refused a Gestapo agent attempting to interrupt
proceedings in a synagogue.

Am I seeing things? First there was his support for
decriminalization of drugs, now he's advocating active (even armed)
civil disobedience against an oppressive and coercive state? Billy,
we hardly knew ye!
Three cheers for Bill Buckley! (Perhaps we should award him a
miniature bust of Lysander Spooner?)

John Taylor is the Maryland Coordinator of the Libertarian Second
Amendment Caucus.

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Enterprise, Number 9, June, 1996.